As a mental health and human rights organisation, SAFMH has a duty to fight for the rights of any and all persons with psychosocial and intellectual disabilities, and if the pandemic has in fact led to even just one person feeling invisible, mentally unwell, insignificant or undignified, that’s one too many in our books. We therefore have a duty to talk about mental health and wellbeing in the context of COVID-19.
SAFMH’s goal with the Resilience zine is to put into practice our brand of “carpe diem”. We wish to seize the moment and capture important learnings, but in contrast to traditional carpe diem, which doesn’t place much focus on the future, we wish to take what we have experienced and learned during the pandemic and apply it to how we approach our work going forward.
We want to grab the opportunity, build on the inadvertent focus that COVID-19 has placed on mental health, and ensure that mental health, whether during emergency situations or just during plain, everyday living, will no longer be invisible. We don’t want anyone with psychosocial or intellectual disability to ever feel invisible again, and we want to ensure that mental health is recognised as a critical component of overall health and wellbeing. Something we ALL have, and something we should ALL aspire to cultivate and treasure.
